Politics should be a marketplace of ideas. Instead, it's a tawdry bazaar

Michael Coulter

I'm not good with voting. I approve of it in principle, but the practice leaves me cold. It's a bit like walking into a restaurant and being offered a choice between salty snot and snotty salt, except that in Australia you're pretty much forced to consume one or the other.

As a result, in the 17 or so years since I became a citizen, I have cast just one formal vote. It was in the 1996 federal election and, at the time, it felt like a contest between the head of the Carlton Crew and the devil's accountant.

Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott face off at the leaders' forum as Australians get ready to cast their ballots. Photo: Andrew Meares

In retrospect, it seems like a golden age in Australian politics, but the lingering sense of distaste has meant it's never happened again. I can say with confidence that neither Kevin Rudd nor Tony Abbott will receive primary or preferential support from me in 2013.

What's more, I'd encourage anyone else to do the same. To the many bemoaning the impossibility of choosing between Rudd and Abbott, I say: you don't have to.

Looking for true political choice in Australia is like looking for water in a desert. Good luck.

Go to the polling booth on the day if necessary (and the law says it is), but unless you actually support one or more parties and their clearly enunciated policies, do a little doodle, or draw some donkey's ears on the ''P'' in ALP, or just leave the thing blank. If enough of us do it, a message might get through.

If this seems feckless in a world where people are fighting and dying for the right to vote, consider this. Those people aren't dying for the right to make a mark on a sheet of paper; they're dying for the right to choose. My choice is that when presented with unacceptable alternatives, I'll take neither. (As a footnote, the worth of an idea should never be measured by the number of people who died for it - a million dead Nazis can be wrong.)

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I don't accept, either, that making a triennial scribble on a ballot is any sort of definition of good citizenship. Living a considered and considerate life, engaging in productive work and keeping the majority of your vices to yourself are better measures.

It's a nuisance that not voting should be a crime, although very much a First World nuisance. Compulsory choice is a logical absurdity, but it's better, on the whole, to be a victim of absurdity than oppression. But I've never heard a convincing case that mandatory voting makes for a better democracy.

If you march everyone off to the polls every few years, it ensures politicians must craft policies that appeal to not just the engaged, thoughtful and responsible, but to the apathetic, greedy, ignorant and downright hostile.

Throw in preferential voting and you get a country so used to two-party rule that it has a collective nervous breakdown over a few years of minority government, a situation that is quite normal in most of the democratic world.

What would be nice, of course, is if there were something or someone that was worth supporting. It would be quite pleasant to vote for someone with the vision and acumen to make this a better country. There has been a lot written about the dismal state of our politics, but just to recap, the choice is between a free-spending, big-government party that wants to lock up refugees on Papua New Guinea, and a free-spending, big-government party that wants to send refugees back where they came from.

So if, for instance, you're of the left, it must be absolute hell to be represented by a party that has concocted the PNG ''solution''. If you're of the right, you'd be in despair over the massive, unfunded appeal to greed that is the paid parental leave scheme. And if you're of the unaligned middle, where fiscal prudence, individual responsibility and social tolerance live, you can forget about it altogether.

Politics should be a marketplace of ideas, where clever people properly answer hard questions. Should we spend more than we earn, and what on? Road or rail? Who gets the right to live here? Is the world going to environmental hell, and if so what do we do about it? Can people be trusted to make up their own minds?

What we've got instead is a some sort of tawdry bazaar, where the goods on offer are duplicity, daft slogans and appeals to base instinct and blind faith. Kevin Rudd says he used to be an awful PM, but says he's learnt from his mistakes and he'll do better next time.

Tony Abbott won't tell us anything much at all, except that we can trust him to be better than the other guys and the numbers will somehow add up. (In fairness to the minor parties, we do know what most of them stand for. It's just a shame that what they stand for is generally dangerous, deluded and unsupportable.)

By casting a vote, you're effectively buying into one or more of those ideas. It's saying that you have confidence in the system, that you accept that one or the other party has a suite of plans and philosophies that you're happy to see implemented for the next three years.